Let there be LIGHT!

Lighting System

First thing I worked on this week was a good lighting system.
I love lighting, because it can change the whole mood and feel of the game.

Day / Night Cycles

I’ve added day and night cycles to the game. Each last about 2 minutes right now for testing purposes.

Bigger Characters

I want the game to be primarily made in 64×64. Up until this point, it’s been 32×32.
This demanded bigger character models as the old character models were under 32×32.Sigh, I’ll miss those little guys.
This makes the game look a lot better when completely zoomed out.

Soon, I’ll begin the process of separating the hands from the body sprite, make a state-machine and then make it look more like the character is holding onto items as well as using them (swinging, holding, harvesting, attacking)

As I’ve been saying, the graphics aren’t set in stone.
Eventually, I’d like to raise money and have all the graphics redesigned! 🙂

Maybe we’ll use the old character models as Garden Gnomes? 😛

Eye Color

There are now several eye colors in the game, rather than just blue. When a player joins a server his skin color, hair and face, and eye color are all randomly generated. The player can change all of this way later into the game.

Base Building

Placeable Objects

You can now place certain items on the ground, and they will stay in the world even after a server restart / server save. Unlike items you throw on the ground from your inventory which disappear after the server restarts or after a short period of time. So basically the server now saves placeable items on the ground onto the harddrive.

What this also means is I can now add items like beds, work benches, anvils, campfires, etc… So this paves the way so that I can start working on base building. This also allowed me to make working storage boxes (containers)!

Containers

I am PLEASED to announce that Containers are now in the game! These are items that you can place in the game world, and store your items (Storage Boxes, Chests, etc…). What’s cool is the server will assign it a unique ID, and save the items you put it in. When you shut the server down (or do a server save) it will save the items onto the hard drive. When you reload the server, it loads all the containers and their contents! Woohoo!

Debug Venting
I think I faced the Final Boss of Debugging with these things only to find out my issue was that two variables in two separate scripts were named the same. That sounds like an easy catch, but when there are about 60 other possible reasons why it’s not working, and you have to debug EACH of those possible reasons, it’s not very simple.

Death and Respawn

Started work on death and respawning. You used to just instantly respawn upon death. Now there’s a death screen, and your character will be removed from the game world (besides your corpse) until you respawn!

In the future, this screen will show stats about your player while he was alive as well as possible respawn points.

Server Changes

Ground Items Fix

The server has a ds grid of every item in the game, and another ds grid for the items thrown on the ground.
Whenever the server is shut down or the server is saved it removes the items on the ground.
Fixed a huge glitch that wasn’t removing the items from the ds_grid that were deleted from the ground during server saves.
This meant there were phantom items that would stay in the servers item ds_grid even though they weren’t accessible.

So basically whenever you restarted the game the items that were on the ground before were still technically in the game, just no where to be found.
This was fixed!

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